I am going to implement a mode in my interface that is completely free-form, allowing the user to assign tracks to locations however they want. Does anyone know of projects that allow for this kind of music library organization?

Today I set up SVN with Trac on scripts.mit.edu, and also Eclipse for Java development on my Mac. I just have to point the Eclipse SVN plugin at my SVN repository now… but I’m going to wait on that until I have some code in there. I went through a tutorial of Eclipse and it looks awesome — I don’t know how I haven’t used it before now.

Also setup TeX and got some TeX templates from friends to start with. I am going to create an outline for my thesis, to which I can continually enter notes as I am reading through all these papers and books.

Also picked up Barry Schwartz’s “The Paradox of Choice: Why more is less” and Kusek/Leonhard’s “The Future of Music”.

I picked up David Jenning’s “Net, Blogs and Rock’n’Roll”, and am working through it. Of most interest to me so far are Alan Lomax’s “cantometrics” work back in the 60s and MusicIP now (including MyDJ). I’m wondering how successful MusicIP has been… What’s it lacking and what do they do well?

Also been working on setting up LaTeX + GUI + citation handling software… argh! … and some revision control for this project. Right now I think I’ll go with BibDesk and TeXShop for writing with LaTeX, and subversion for RCS. Any advice welcome, as always.

Argh, getting back to normalcy now, much later than I’d anticipated. I’ve been in Austin and Taiwan, then back to Boston, over the last couple of weeks, and although I’ve been busy, it hasn’t been with thesis-related stuff specifically.

But now, I’m back to work for good, ready to crank hard and consistently until I finish in May.

Today I met Takuya Fujishima, of Yamaha, and talked with him about soundsieve and my thesis project. He’s a very interesting guy, completely on top of the work going on in MIR — he specifically mentioned Paul (Lamere) and Elias Pampalk when I was talking to him about my project. He also suggested I look into the work of these Japanese researchers:

Masataka Goto — worked with Elias Pampalk on MusicSun and MusicRainbow

This is certainly a good start in getting back to reading relevant papers. I’m definitely curious to know if there are must-read papers/people that I should take a look at. I’m interested in these topics specifically:

interfaces for music browsing and recommendation

multidimensional analysis

audio features that are commonly used to discriminate between different styles/genres

projects that combine audio analysis with contextual descriptors

commentary on what makes an “appropriate” music database (how to have it as unbiased as possible?)

interface design for 3D spaces

I found these lists of MIR-related papers/dissertations, and will look through them: